The 2008 financial crisis and its impacts on the urban landscape contributed to a proliferation of research on the financialization of urban space, particularly of housing. Today, financialization is a mainstream focus of study within geography. But while scholars have responded to earlier calls to center space and place in their research, it has only been quite recently that geographers have taken up efforts to politicize and contest the financialization of urban space. This essay assesses the emerging body of literature on urban struggles with financialization. It first draws on historical materialist perspectives to situate financialization within urban contexts, showing why there is a particular relationship between this process and urban space, and how moments of crisis reveal tensions in this relationship. Reviewing literature focused on places exposed to the most systemic housing–financial crises in 2008, the essay then explores how residents, activists, and movements have grappled with financialization. It argues that a key aspect of such struggles is the ability to make their presence felt within chains of financial intermediaries or the corporate headquarters of foreign investors. The essay also highlights how moments of crisis open space for more radical tactics that disrupt the dominant production of space and emphasize the social value of housing. It suggests ways to fruitfully expand geographic inquiry into urban struggles with financialization through focusing on the formation of political subjectivities and engaging geographies beyond the global north.

This article is concerned with new modes of property-led financial accumulation emerging in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Focusing on the United States, the article traces the creation of an asset class derived from securitizing the rental income of foreclosed homes turned rental properties. The study strategically combines conceptual agendas often pursued separately. Theories of market formation rooted in science and technology studies inform the method of analysis so as to attend to the work of realizing markets, the role of calculative devices in market formation, and the contingent and conditional aspects of markets. This analysis reveals the single-family rental (SFR) asset class as a practical accomplishment. However, a broader framework rooted in political economy is necessary to attend to the broader significance of the SFR asset class in terms of power, politics, and the dynamics of capital accumulation. The article particularly focuses upon the historical and geographic contingencies making it possible to conceive of a large-scale SFR market, the work of state and capital market actors in reframing repossessed single-family homes as rental properties and the role calculative practices played in this process, and the strategies of issuers and credit rating agencies to frame a novel asset class for institutional investors. The SFR asset class affirms the fundamental role for housing in the ideology of capital, and speaks to new entanglements of financial actors and home life as financial accumulation is adjusted to the postcrisis context. Beyond shedding light on postcrisis housing financialization, the article demonstrates how economic geographers can carefully integrate theoretical perspectives to critically examine both the circumstances of market formation and the social, spatial, and political consequences of markets.

As cities have become both site and object of capital accumulation in a neoliberal political economy, the challenges to community practice aimed at creating, preserving, and improving affordable housing and neighborhoods have grown. Financial markets and actors are increasingly central to the workings of capitalism, transforming the meaning and significance of mortgage capital in local communities and redrawing the relationship between housing and urban inequality. This article addresses the integration of housing and financial markets through the case of "predatory equity," a wave of aggressive private equity investment in New York City's affordable rental sector during the mid-2000s real estate boom. I consider the potential for community organizations to develop innovative, effective, and progressive practices to contest the impact of predatory equity on affordable housing. Highlighting how organizations employed discursive and empirical tactics as well as tactics that reworked the sites, spaces, and structures of finance, this research speaks to the political possibility of contemporary community practice.

This article seeks to advance debates about the financialization of housing by focusing on the emergence of rental housing as a frontier for financialization, a dynamic that is increasingly relevant since the global financial crisis. Situated in New York City, the research focuses on an aggressive wave of investment in affordable rent-stabilized properties by private equity firms, their efforts to release value from these properties, and the implications of the 2008 financial crisis for their investment strategies and thus for tenants’ experience of home. Through detailed empirical analysis tracing the connections between how rental housing has been constituted as a new site for private equity investment globally, the local conditions facilitating this process in New York and how it reshaped everyday life for tenants, the article theorizes tenants as unwilling subjects of financialization. Yet unwillingness does not necessarily translate into being overtaken; it also connotes reluctance and indeed struggle. This novel conceptualization highlights the ways in which financialization meets with dissent, and its necessarily contingent and incomplete nature. The article therefore develops the wider intellectual project of understanding financialization not as a monolithic and inevitable process, but as one characterized by resistance from without and contradiction from within.

A wide range of digital innovations has changed property relations globally over the past fifteen years. What are we to make of these digital experiments with landed property? I argue we should not mistake their technological novelty for a break with the geographic and historical specificities of property relations. The yoking of property to modernity and civilization makes technological progress a fundamental part of how relationships to land are constituted and reconstituted, and in whose interests, throughout global capitalism. In this article, I situate 21st century housing market technologies within sedimented relations of landed property in the United States, showing the history of property innovation in the United States is also one of racialized wealth accumulation and dispossession. I interpret current anxieties about ‘robot landlords’ as anxieties about how the shifting landscape of property ownership appears to threaten the economic benefits associated with racial dominance.

This article centers the role of digital technologies in extending financial accumulation into new sectors of the US housing market in the wake of the global financial crisis. I argue that while post-crisis market conditions provided an opportunity for large investors to acquire foreclosed single-family homes, convert them to rental housing, and roll out an new asset class based on bundled rent checks, these conditions were insufficient on their own. Digital innovations coming to prominence since the 2008 crisis were required to automate core functions, such as rent collection and maintenance, in order to efficiently manage large, geographically dispersed property portfolios. New information technologies enabled investors to aggregate ownership of resources, extract income flows, and securely convey these flows to capital markets. Such advances have, therefore, given rise to the “automated landlord”, whereby the management of tenants and properties is increasingly not only mediated, but governed, by smartphones, digital platforms, and apps, and the data and analytics these devices and infrastructures gather and enable. This article shows how technological transformations actively participate in the ongoing, dynamic process of financial accumulation strategies, and contends that digital technologies, therefore, also comprise a crucial terrain of struggles over housing’s place in contemporary capitalism.

This rejoinder engages with the commentaries on my article on ‘Digital experiments with landed property’ from Julien Migozzi and Sara Safransky. In my response, I share my reflections on the valuable provocations and interrelated themes offered in these generous commentaries. First, I argue that an especially distinctive aspect of digital experiments with landed property is the volumetric property relations they are generating. Second, I attend to subjectivities cultivated within and against digitised property relations, and how they relate to structures of power. Third, I extend my thinking on the glitchiness and fallibility associated with processes of experimentation.